Running the full gamut of scholarship from physical science to philosophy, archaeology’s diversity can be a negative rather than a positive—when the same phenomena can attract such different approaches that archaeologists end up talking past one another. Take the example of archaeological landscape analysis: on the one hand, this has produced rich, expressive phenomenological studies, and on the other, detailed palaeoenvironmental reconstructions. These two perspectives are not commonly combined, although when they are archaeology emerges as a solid bridge between the humanities and the environmental sciences (van der Leeuw and Redman 2002; Smith et al. 2012). Take another example: artefact studies—on the one hand, poetic, philosophical musings on anything from fabulous artworks to mundane artefacts, and on the other, neutron activation analysis, X-ray diffraction and petrography employed in characterizing stone and ceramic technologies. There are calls (e.g. Jones 2004; Sillar and Tite 2000) to ‘humanise’ the science (and vice versa would also be fitting), and perhaps in artefact studies the integration of the sciences and humanities has had more success than in landscape studies. It is a difficult balancing act. But those archaeological studies that do find a way to combine both often create more convincing interpretations. Alongside landscape and artefact studies, network analysis is a third exemplar of this tension between scientific and humanistic understandings in archaeology. On the one hand, networks can be used quite formally and quantitatively to analyse interactions in space or, indeed, cultural evolution over time (Henrich and Broesch 2011). This use of networks is quite different from a more qualitative, figurative use, as seen recently in book-length treatments by Irad Malkin (2011) and Ian Hodder (2012). There is a danger of the gap between these different understandings of networks widening, just as the humanistic and scientific understandings of both landscapes and artefacts can sometimes seem incommensurate. I think one can see a certain reticence about being sucked into the ‘scientism’ of networks, what one might even dub ‘networkitis’, along the lines of ‘Darwinitis’ or the tendency for all manner of cultural phenomena to now find ‘explanation’ through evolutionary models, and recently the subject of a stinging critique by Raymond Tallis (2011).
The subject of exemption: through discourses of normalization and individualization in Denmark
